Books

When you haven’t got much meat, it requires a lot of filler to create a decent sandwich. The meat here is the brief period, beginning in 1954, when Louis Prima and Keely Smith reigned as the hottest lounge act in Vegas, and it is pretty thin. Apart from...

The New Face of Jazz begins with a simple premise: Jazz is neither dead nor stagnant. In the 21st century, innovation still drives the genre, and new practitioners of the art surface all the time, pushing it ahead. Author Cicily Janus, who is a musician...

The challenge for any biographer approaching a subject whose life story is ingrained in the world’s cellular memory is to introduce something new to that tale. For Pops , his exhaustive Louis Armstrong bio, author Terry Teachout benefited from unprecedented...

Be it with friends, lovers, wives or bands, Artie Shaw was a serial deserter. So reveals biographer Tom Nolan in his breezily written yet painstakingly detailed Three Chords for Beauty’s Sake . Diggers in search of celebrity dirt will surely be disappointed...

In Richard Williams’ The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music , Williams accomplishes two very difficulty things. First, he proves that despite books and other writings about the Miles Davis classic, there is still so much...

Rinzler explores ”four pairs of opposites in jazz; individualism and interconnectedness, assertion and openness, freedom and responsibility, and creativity and tradition.” He examines each of them in detail in a separate chapter and then discusses how they...